Page 40 of Storm and Sea

At this, Atreus and Nyel shared a glance with barely repressed smiles.

Horace squinted across the round table as though looking from a great distance. “We have an intruder in our midst.”

“Oh, sorry, this is Nyel, a friend of mine,” Atreus said through a mouthful of pancetta.

“Hmmm.” Horace narrowed his watery eyes. “A new young face.” He inhaled dramatically. “I served in the twenty-fourth division of the Marina Militara.”

“Here we go,” Marina mumbled under her breath. They’d all heard this story.

A few times.

Per day.

Every summer.

For most of their lives.

Horace ignored his granddaughter and reached a trembling hand to the sleeve of his shirt, pulling it to reveal the number twenty-four tattooed in roman numerals.

“Wow,” Nyel said, his tone sincere. “You fought in the huma—I mean the war?”

“Sure did, young man,” Horace grunted with a proud smack on the table. His breakfast was forgotten. “The twenty-fourth fought on the fiercest ship in the Marina Militara. We called her La Balena Foroce.”

Atreus tuned out the majority of the conversation. He’d heard it a thousand times—the ship’s victories, the battles it had seen, until its inevitable demise when it finally succumbed to the violence of war, sinking to the bottom of the sea where it now slept. The pescheria was named the ‘Sleeping Whale’ in honor of the sunken warship.

As long as he kept the story true to its official series of events, there shouldn’t be a problem. It was when Horace diverted into fiction that the problems began⁠—

Horace reached for a framed black-and-white photo he always kept close by. “This was the twenty-fourth regiment, and this man,” he pointed to a young man with a bright face, visible even in the grainy black-and-white photo. “That is me.”

Nyel leaned forward in his chair as Horace’s finger slid over.

“And this man beside me was my best friend, Kirill. And he was a Mer.”

Atreus choked on his eggs.

“Nonno, what did we say about telling that story?” Marina warned, though there wasn’t any weight in her words.

“How can I not tell the truth? Just because the papers refused to print it does not mean it didn’t happen. Uomo del Mare fought in the war whether you kids believe it or not,” he said, banging a non-threatening fist on the table.

“Nonno,” Marina said in a pitying voice, “Mer do not exist.”

“How can you say that when I have a photograph right here!” he said, shaking the small picture as though this settled the matter.

“That is a picture of a man, Nonno.”

“They transform! Kirill looked like a man on land, but once in the water, he turned into a creature unlike anything I’d ever seen. He had scales blue as the darkest part of the sea and gills like a fish.” He made three slashing motions on the side of his neck with a pointed finger.

“Oh, Nonno,” Marina said, resigned to her breakfast.

“Kirill was my best friend, but as soon as the war ended, he took to the sea, and I never saw him again. All the Mer have hidden from us now.” Horace stared at the picture with a sad expression. His fingers trembled as they traced over the faded faces, unfinished words lingering on his lips. “I often wonder what I said to make Kirill want to hide from me. I never got the chance…” He trailed off, lost in a past he couldn’t change.

Atreus tried to keep his face neutral as his jaw clenched. Nyel looked from him to Horace as though to say, Are you hearing this!?

Atreus shook his head, telling him to keep quiet.

He had heard it. A million times told in a million different ways. All from the mouths of the old crowd—men and women who saw the war and lived to tell the stories. Horace wasn’t the only one who spun tales of Mer, but those tales were becoming fewer and fewer as the oldest generation passed. Now, their stories were largely regarded as fiction—legends at best or delirious war stories born of trauma and drink at worst. One day, even Horace’s stories would be gone from this world.

And the idea of Mer will vanish from humans entirely.